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I'm against the use of gimmees (freebies, give-aways, junk, etc) in trade show booths. If you don't start doing it, you'll never have to stop. Just like smoking cigarettes. Both can be bad for your health.
I've had a dozen conversations like this one, but it serves as a good example. I'd had a booth at several B2B trade shows where I was near the same printing company. During this one, they were giving away pads that looked like melon slices. At the top was printed "Honeydew List." They had stacks of other pads out on display, but this was the most popular by far. People were coming by and literally taking away half a dozen at a time, without asking or even being talked to by the booth staff. Word was getting around, apparently, as I heard people coming up the aisle saying, "Those honeydew lists are around here someplace." By the middle of the afternoon, those pads were all gone.
You’ve written your book. It’s published – print, ebook, audio, maybe all three. You wrote a first draft, then a second, third and forth. Then there was the editing. Sometimes you changed a line, or a paragraph. Sometimes it was a word, or just a punctuation mark. But you’re tired of the damned thing, and it doesn’t matter anymore because it’s published. You can forget about it.
Well. . . no. You can’t. Novel or non-fiction, in order for people to stumble on it by chance, loving every word and telling all their friends to buy a copy, the book must be promoted.
Here’s a sad (perhaps) fact for you: all that effort to write your book is just the tip of the iceberg. In order for you to become the next shining literary beacon, the bottom 90% of your iceberg needs to be completed. You need to be interviewed, to be quoted, to do readings for rooms small and even smaller. You need to remain completely upbeat when getting up early and staying up late for phone interviews, saying the same things over and over again. Blogs and magazines won’t go out and find your book on a store shelf, rushing home to read it and gush over it to their myriad readers. It needs to be put into their hands.
I’ll be 50 years old in a few months. Next week, the karate school where I train – CNY Karate – is hosting masters from our home dojo in Okinawa City, Okinawa, Japan. Some of these people have been training in karate longer than I’ve been alive. As I was talking with one of the classes a couple nights ago, they asked me what the Okinawan karate-ka would be going over with us. Advanced techniques? Spinning jump kicks? Breaking boards while flying through the air?
No. They’ll be drilling us on the basics. In karate, that’s a small handful of blocks, punches and kicks. These basic building blocks can be put together in nearly endless combinations to achieve a martial artist’s goals. These can range from simple protection, repelling an opponent, causing limited physical damage, serious damage, or even death. Overall, the practice of the physical aspects of karate are really about learning to control your own body, mind and spirit.
I used to have lunch at a chain sandwich shop near my office a few times a month. When they first opened, they were doing a good business. I enjoyed the place enough that I signed up for the corporate emails, which sometimes included coupons. I’d print them off and use them in the restaurant.
Granted, the town where I had my office has slid far, far downhill in the last 15 years. Three major factories closed around 1998, and a lot of the people left in town don’t make anywhere near as much money as they used to. So any business there is kind of hard.
There was (and still is) another franchised sandwich shop in town. For years, that chain had been my favorite. But they’d begun raising their prices to what I consider a ridiculous level, and I was really enjoying the new place anyway.
I was speaking to a friend of mine today when he asked, “Did you hear the news?”
Seems a small, well-respected Italian restaurant near him is moving down the road into a building that has housed at least three major chain restaurants in the last 30 years. This building is literally 4 times larger than their current location.
I love this restaurant. It’s romantic, it’s intimate. The food is great, and because they can’t fit that many people in the place at one time, it comes out hot, fresh and hand-made just for you. We lamented the fact that, if the move is real, it will doom this restaurant. They’ll be out of business by February.